The life insurance player is betting on open source technologies and is also running a pilot on wearable technologies

DHFL Pramerica Life Insurance (DPLI)’s AceApp has served an ace by clocking 70 percent of the retail business of DPLI since it was launched in 2017. The app simplifies the customer interaction and sales related procedures of the salesforce. The company has also made commensurate investments in the backend to facilitate seamless information exchange.

DPLI launched AceApp, a bundle of digital tools for the salesforce in early 2017. The objective was to make customer interactions simple and easy, given the complex nature of the life insurance business. Even today, there are certain products that are not allowed to be sold online because of the complex nature. It requires the sales person to sit down with the customer, do the need analysis and narrow down the product required. “The use of digital tools has significantly helped us. As part of our digital transformation, AceApp has been identified as a key project,” says Anshuman Verma, Chief Marketing & Digital Officer, DHFL Pramerica Life Insurance. It manages the sales process, end-to-end.

The AceApp provides an end to end processing of the sales cycle, enabling the salesforce to be productive, beginning with need analysis, generation of quotations (AceApp has one of the fastest quotation generation engines in the Industry); the app allows automated debit from the debit card or the bank account; validates various identity documents online; pulling authentication related documents and photographs during onboarding. The customer can try out multiple options on product types and also with how much premium, what kind of products are available. The app offers tremendous help on reducing the documentation fatigue with features such as partial applications when certain documents are unavailable, which can be submitted later.

These features have made the app a popular application for the retail business. “More than 70 percent of the retail business of DHFL Pramerica Life Insurance is acquired through the AceApp, since it was launched in late 2017,” says Verma. The PoC kickoff was in 2017, and thereafter the app went mainstream in the first quarter of 2018. The premium payment is also collected through the app. A link is generated by the payment gateway, which sends a customised link to the customer. He can authorise the payment by clicking the link. Every link is unique to the respective customer.

The AceApp was subjected to a combination of automated and human testing before it was rolled out. A monthly release cycle is followed. A combination of inhouse and vendor team manages the app. The inhouse team has about 10 employees, in addition the vendor resources are onboarded, when the need arises.

The company has actively invested in upgrading the middleware that interacts with the backend. A substantial amount of work has also been done in workflow automation and management. A strong middleware technology facilitates the seamless sync of the front end and the backend. Investments have also been made in compression technologies for faster data synchronisation. How this helps is, it has completely digitised the policy application process. As soon as a policy is acquired by the sales agent on the front end, it directly gets into the Business Process Management System at the backend, which in absence of an end to end digitisation would have gone separately to the the underwriting and financial reconciliation teams.

The broad advantage of digitisation is it congregates customer information and provides a unified view in terms of the overall exposure the company has, on group insurance, life insurance. It also enables talking to third party systems and correlate with data from external sources like checks from credit bureau, social profile, etc.

Potential of open source
DPLI’s AceApp runs on an open source mobile application platform, provided by Red Hat. Furthermore, the company is extensively using the technology for other purposes. “The proprietary system providers wants to make money even on their solution training and education initiatives. This puts pressure on the enterprise decision makers to go for open source technologies. The advantage is with the flexibility to experiment, learn and implement. Open source is the future and the use of proprietary technologies will wane,” says Verma.

PoC on tracking health vitals:
Currently, the insurance companies are discussing on a consultative paper and working towards creating a necessary infrastructure around using wearable technologies. “DPLI is running a closed user pilot with our employees by correlating physical data and their activity levels to offer some services to motivate customers in adopting a better lifestyle,” concludes Verma.

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